Word: planck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Frivolous Jumps. In the neatly appropriate year of 1900, a discovery was made that was to knock the props from under classical physics. In his Berlin laboratory, Max Planck, a 42-year-old German physicist, was trying to describe mathematically the emission of light by glowing bodies. No one had done it and Planck could not do it either-until, in a sort of desperation, he assumed that light does not flow in a smooth stream, as everyone supposed, but in tiny, indivisible bursts...
...time this was frivolity, almost like saying that a railroad train moves in one-foot jumps. But as soon as Planck made his daring assumption, his equations came to heel, describing the emission of radiant energy with elegant precision...